Materials and items for use in a variety of manufacturing and other processes are often placed in stacks to enable the items to be more economically positioned and utilized within the processes. For example, many items are shipped from their location of origin to an assembly location where the materials or items are combined with other items to form a completed product. In shipping these materials/items, the items are often placed in stacked configurations on pallets or other similar structures in order to ship a number of the items at the same time in an economic manner.
When placed in these stack configurations, on difficulty is removing the desired number of items from the stack for use in the process. This is a particularly difficult problem when the items are very thin and do not provide a significant side profile enabling the items to be easily removed from the stack.
One industry that in which this issue can significantly affect the operation of the overall process is the paper and corrugated industry, which deals with corrugated and non-corrugated cardboard and paperboard blanks that are fed from stacks for further processing of the sheets, blanks or boards. Examples of these types of machines include laminators, labelers, flexo folder gluers, rotary die cutters, flat bed die cutters, specialty folder gluers and machines which cut and/or crease the boards in order to form a blank into an erectable box for use in packaging different types of items.
In the paper and corrugated industry, the issues pertaining to the removal of the cardboard and paperboard sheets applies in both the initial product forming process, where certain numbers of blanks need to be removed from stacks to supply the machines forming the products from the blanks, and downstream processes which may use the formed paper or cardboard products, such as processes where selected number of the formed blanks are needed to supply the machines used to erect the containers from the formed blanks.
To perform this task, both manual and automated machines and methods are currently used to continuously and repeatedly supply the selected number of sheets, blanks or boards to a feeder, which in turn feeds the sheets, blanks or boards into a machine for further processing. Manual and automated methods each have their advantages and disadvantages.
With the manual methods, while the space and costs necessary for employing this method are reasons for employing the method, other considerations such as the safety of the individual moving the sheets, blanks or boards can weigh heavily against it in light of the likelihood of back injuries, muscle sprains and other injuries associated with repetitive moments.
With current automated methods, while the capital cost of the machine utilized is more than manual labor, the long term labor costs are less. However, in methods employing prior art automated machines, the machines have significant issues with regard to the separation of the desired numbers of items from the stack. The issue can be compounded when the machine is tasked with separating sheets, blanks or boards of different thicknesses, as the machine must be able to adjust to the new size of the item to be able to remove the selected number of items from the stack.
Therefore, it is desirable to develop an apparatus and method for removing selected numbers of items from a stack that includes a mechanism for effectively separating the desired number of items from the stack of items, and that has sufficient operational flexibility as a result of the operating system for the apparatus to adjust to varying thicknesses of the items to be displaced by the apparatus.